


virtues of the father

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Coulson's Daddy Issues, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, Made Up Background, i deal with my CATWS issues this way, i never give Coulson's father a name and that's important to me, kind of AU after 1x16 oops, lol plot what is that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 17:11:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1436290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skye sets out to repair something more important than just Coulson's faith in humanity.</p><p>(Spoilers for Captain America: The Winter Soldier)</p><p>(Also this has already been Jossed by 1x17, so enjoy the slight AUness)</p>
            </blockquote>





	virtues of the father

_It was the height of summer when they came for him._

_The boy was shooting hoops in the front porch, killing time before dinner._

_The father did not resist, he let himself be dragged out of the house, the men stepping on the bed of pale pink roses his wife had grown on a whim after not paying attention to their garden in years. He tells her not to follow, tells the boy not to follow. He doesn't say not to worry, though. He offers no excuses, explanations. He is calm when the other three men push him into the back of a black car._

 

+

 

It's been bugging her and of course they have more pressing matters to attend to right now but still. She has to say something.

She corners Coulson as he is walking into his office.

“I know that with everything that happened we haven't had time to talk but... I just wanted to say that, I'm sorry I brought up your father's death when we were talking about the Clairvoyant. It was just pragmatic.”

At least his face doesn't do the horrible thing it did when she brought up the subject earlier and that's good, because Skye is not sure she can stand to watch that again. It's not so great, the face he's making right now, but it's still better.

“I know,” he says. “It's fine.”

But she saw the doubt in his eyes that time, wondering exactly what was in his file, exactly what she knew. Probably thinking she had no right to know the bare minimum at all. 

“Anyway the file said nothing about it, just that he died and it was a defining moment for you,” she assures him. “No circumstances or anything. So I know nothing, really. It stays private. I wouldn't want you to think I was prying.”

“He was SHIELD. My father,” Coulson says, so quietly and calmly that he could be talking about a stranger. “He was a SHIELD agent. An specialist, it's what we call it these days. The kind of agent you wouldn't want to encounter in the enemy side. So it was really fortunate that the organization caught wind of his plans to assassinate a Level 8 agent before he could see it through.”

“I don't –“

“He was a traitor, Skye. He killed his partner because he found out what my father was. Sold SHIELD to the highest bidder. Or maybe he believed the bad guys had a point, nobody ever found out.”

“He killed his partner...?”

He nods. “It's not in my file for the sake of my professional career. You can appreciate how it would have affected people's consideration of me, if they ever knew.”

Skye can't even think about that; she's still struggling with the first piece of information.

“What happened? Did they...?” She feels sick just saying the words. “Did they execute him?”

Coulson shakes his head. “He tried to escape while they were transporting him to a SHIELD holding facility.”

He gives her a brief, resigned look and then moves away, trying to slip past her and into his office.

“Coulson, wait.”

She grabs his arm. They both look down at her fingers wrapped around his elbow, a little stunned. She's never done that.

“You can't tell me you are fine, after that. Just... _talk to me_. Okay?”

“Not now. We have other things to worry about now.”

“But later...?”

He nods. Skye's eyes are big and full of worry and unrelenting. She knows she's pushing him unfairly.

“ _Later_ ,” he promises.

 

+

 

 _Later_ never comes because then, of course, the world breaks, the pieces fall over their heads, and they no longer remember than conversation.

Their world breaks and they have to decide, are they part of the pieces or part of the hand that came crashing everything down.

 

+

 

_“How can they let the son of a traitor in?”_  
 _“I hear they are promoting him – level two.”_  
 _“What is the Director thinking?”_

_At first he imagined all the conversations were about him. Every whispered word in a corner, surely directed at him. He imagined everybody in the building knew, even though he had been promised that was not possible._

_He is going to bury it so deep – not just any connection, but any resemblance. He is never wearing his hair like him, long and unruly. He is never wearing clothes like his._

_He is glad he hasn't inherited his sharp features, his goofy grin._

_But those first days at SHIELD HQ he worries mostly about what he has inherited. What exactly is in his blood? Is treason a genetic trait? Is weakness? No, he decides. Blood can scream all it wants, but he is never going to be his father's son. He is going to be strong and loyal even if it kills him._

_(it will)_

_He lets it hurt him, but only when he can afford it._

 

+

 

She could say she has looked for him everywhere but it's not true. Something told her, soon, that he was hiding in the back of the SUV.

They are no longer on the air. They are parked and inert in the Hub's hangar, for whatever long the place is still functional. They are waiting for orders that will never come again.

“Can I come in? Do you want to be alone?”

Coulson scoots over for reply. She sits by his side.

“Taking over my bad habits?” she asks.

“Perhaps I should have started earlier.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Rising Tide – you were always very adamant SHIELD was keeping uglier secrets than anyone could imagine. Your first instinct was that we were the bad guys, and you were right.”

“ _You_ are not the bad guys. We are not.”

“You should have trusted your gut.”

“I _did_. That's why I joined. That's why you said I had ten minutes to decide but as soon as I climbed into Lola with you I knew what the answer was.”

“You were joining because you wanted to spy on us,” he points out.

Skye's heart catches in her throat. After all this time it's shocking hearing him talk like this. She knows he is taking this very hard and she doesn't blame him but still.

“That wasn't the only reason I joined. And you _know that_.”

Coulson growls, sliding further down the seat.

“I should have never taken you with us...” he says softly.

She knows this time he definitely doesn't mean what he is saying.

“Hey, look, I'm not going to pretend that there something anyone could say right now that would make all this not suck immensely,” she says.

He nods his head slowly.

“All my life I have served SHIELD thinking that no matter how wrong they were in their methods I could be sure they were trying to help people. And now I discover it was all a lie – worse than a lie. I have been following HYDRA orders, all this time. I myself may have ordered the imprisonment, the death of targets selected by HYDRA. How many innocent people –?”

“You can't think about that.”

“Why not?”

“You couldn't know.”

“Those people are still dead. They're still innocent.”

She goes very silent for a moment.

“When you told me about Agent Avery and how she died to protect me part of me felt glad. It was horrible, of course, what had happened to all those people but. Before that moment I had never felt that I mattered to anyone, not really. And then you told me that and it was like – SHIELD, I did matter to SHIELD. It felt good to be part of something for the first time.”

He looks at her and his eyes finally see her, for the first time in hours. “And now that something is irredeemably corrupted.”

“I'm not saying I can compare to what you are going through. But for me SHIELD was the first time in my life I felt I belonged. Above all for me _you_ were SHIELD, so SHIELD represented everything I wanted to be.”

He gives her a tiny nod, like he understands. And well, Coulson is still Coulson, even if Skye no longer has SHIELD she still has that.

He looks over her shoulder and to the car door.

“I do not feel like going out there and facing the music,” he tells her. “At all.”

“I know what you mean. But I've learned – from hiding in my van many a time – that it never does any good. The world is still there when you get out. And in the meantime you might have missed something important.”

“I guess you are right.”

She touches her fingers against his wrist for just a moment: “But we can stay here a bit longer, if you want.”

 

+

 

_He never quite grasped the idea that his father had different hours than the rest of the fathers._

_His parents had explained, tried to explain, that his father worked for the government and couldn't be the kind of father other kids got to have. When he was a bit older they even explained that what his father did could be dangerous at times. It had upset him, of course, and they had all went out for ice cream afterwards, which is as normal as his family ever got, and later he would remember his father asking for three scoops, he would remember his father's sweet tooth._

_For other fathers –for other kids– there always were barbecues on sundays and baseball games and meetings with teachers and summer vacations in a beach house. That was the other version of ordinary – one the boy didn't know he was supposed to be missing._

_He only knew that his father would sometimes come home after working the whole night, appear as they were preparing to have breakfast, help the boy set up the table, place one hand on his wife's shoulder for a moment, then take out the jug of juice from the fridge. It was normal because it was normal for them. And on the days where he didn't have a mission and was home early his father cooked dinner, taking out the turntable to the kitchen and listening and dancing to the Supremes or Martha and the Vandellas while the pasta boiled and on school nights the boy sat watching his mother chop the tomatoes and sway her body to those songs and it might sound idyllic but it wasn't, it was life, and later the boy couldn't reconcile that image, that ridiculous, ridiculous man with the words they threw at his memory – words like “traitor” and “murderer” so the boy decided it must all have been a lie, a long con, the breakfasts, and the cooking with music, and the harmless smile, all that must have been a front, a mask, the real man somewhere between killing his best friend in cold blood and trying to sell his country to the enemy._

 

+

 

In a post-SHIELD world Skye's skills become essential.

The world is in ruins and someone has to do the clean-up.

“It's still better than sweeping the floors for Asgardian artefacts,” Coulson says, shrugging, in a better mood these days now that they had something to do, other than licking their wounds.

HYDRA agents had survived all these years in the shadows, of course when their identities were revealed they wouldn't be stupid enough to wait around until a car full of pissed off ex-SHIELD operatives came to pick them up.

“It starts here,” Skye says because well, at least they have a plane.

He agrees.

It's not like there's any chance of salvaging SHIELD, there never was, you had to burn it down. But this is SHIELD's responsibility, it had been their mistake. They were the ones who had to rebuild it from the ground.

“Priorities?” she asks.

“SHIELD Academy,” Coulson says with horror in his face.

“Oh _god_.”

How many HYDRA agents had taken teaching positions, had _groomed_ the new, bright recruits, modelling them to protect the new world, HYDRA's new world, without a complain? It makes her shudder. This was not about bad seeds at all. And Skye thinks about Fitz and Simmons in class, drinking these men's words as if gospel, and it makes her wonder if Fitz's sometimes cruelty, his offhand disregard for life, comes from this. This is how you hijack the future. Hearts and minds indeed.

They can't be sure but Coulson is right; they have to purge the Academy, even if the doors are closed and unlikely to open ever again (monumental buildings fallen into uselessness, this is the end of a regime as much as anything else, they can't pretend otherwise, they can't pretend Rome hasn't burned or the Berlin Wall hasn't been knocked down).

She finds the targets, roots out the deceit buried in decades of paperwork and misdirection.

She finds the targets and Coulson coordinates the missions, leads the interrogations.

They run the show nobody else wants to run. They run the show and even Victoria Hand is only too happy to heed Coulson's orders these days. She's among those who have nowhere else to go now. They step up these days, the bureaucrats, the Hands and Coulsons and Blakes of this world. It's _the pawns_ rising this time, the pawns learning how to lead – and this, this is another of HYDRA's miscalculations, not just the bright sun of Steve Rogers, but the dull light of these gray men and women.

Their house might have rotten and fallen down, but there's still the question of the rats who spent decades gnawing at the foundations. These are the men and women who care about that question.

And they are here, in these rooms full of old documents and new uncertainties, they are here working to the sound of Skye's frantic keystrokes across the room, they are on the other side of the line, always ready like young, idealistic recruits, they are raiding their savings and retirement plans to buy ammunition, fuel for the Bus, they are _volunteers_ and there has never been such purity in their gestures before, finally, after all is lost.

Somewhere else Steve Rogers is looking for the Winter Soldier.

Somewhere else Brock Rumlow becomes Crossbones.

Not all stories have to be as spectacular.

 

+

 

_He changed his name before applying to join SHIELD._

_He took his mother's name. He was promised his past would remain unknown except to a very select group of high ranking agents. His father's file had been sealed and buried, after all. Even in its day it had brought the organization so much shame that they had decided to pretend it never happened._

_“We'll strike the connection to your father from the records, irrevocably” the then Director of SHIELD had said._

_Nobody really asked him why he wanted to join; he never really asked why they'd let him. It was the same answer, after all._

 

+

 

When Skye thinks about Coulson's father she thinks: _well, that explains your obsession with Captain America_.

It all makes sense, really. Horrible sense.

For her it all starts, somehow, with Howard Stark.

The ripples of it are felt throughout the net former SHIELD agents; the idea that its founder was killed before he could tell the world the truth.

The idea that at least he was going to tell the world the truth.

(and being comforted by it, comforted that nothing as prosaic as a car accident was to blame; comforted by the idea that there have always been people fighting back, from the beginning; comforted Steve Rogers is the last in a long line of rebels and whistleblowers)

How different history would have been.

There's still time for a gesture, though: SHIELD's facilities are closing down so nobody cares about Walls of Honor anymore, but there's a ceremony and a newly carved gravestone and the next time Tony Stark appears on their tv screens and talks about it Skye thinks he has the air of a little boy uncomfortable wearing a suit a size too small.

It gets her thinking.

At first it's just a gut feeling, even less than that. But this is what she does: find connections where no connection should go, she's wired like that. It's just a shadow, the beginning of a suspicion. But it's enough to get her to work, because somebody has to.

Who else is going to do it? For every Howard Stark, famous, relevant, _defining_ , there must be a bunch of anonymous agents who stumbled upon revelations, who saw or heard what they weren't meant to, who had to be taken out of Zola's equation before the equation could work. The tiny glitches nobody noticed at the time, Skye is sure she can find them.

People would tell her what is the point, she should follow fresh trails, not try to solve cold cases.

It doesn't matter, to her it's one and the same. Skye knows truth is a weapon, the only one that matters – truth is a weapon and sometimes it's the last one you have to defend yourself.

 

+

 

_It's funny how people start mistaking shame for dedication._

_It's funny how, after some time in the organization, so does Coulson._

 

+

 

She digs up his file.

She has wanted to do this before, if she is honest with herself. But it has felt like a violation of Coulson's privacy. He had offered up enough details, reading the actual words feels like a betrayal and god knows Coulson has had enough of that in his life.

There's a picture of the man there and she is surprised by the lack of family resemblance. Makes her wonder about Coulson's mother instead and how she must have looked. Skye doesn't like thinking about Coulson as an orphan – that's the kind of thing that happens to people like her, but it shouldn't happen to someone like him. It makes her sadder than anything.

There's little family resemblance except maybe the eyes, the eyebrows. If she looks close enough she can tell it's him.

The charges were clear, seemingly. Murder of a fellow SHIELD agent, someone named Guerin, because he had discovered Coulson's father's plans to sell American secrets to the Soviets, because he had discovered the secret orders to assassinate a high rank in the organization. There were witnesses, and a confession. There were surveillance logs – no pictures of his encounters with enemy agents, though, just the word of the agent in charge of following him.

Curiously enough this case, before being sealed forever and stricken from the record, had fanned the dying flames of a too-cold Cold War for SHIELD. It hadn't been that many years since Anton Vanko was deported back to Russia and after the incident SHIELD became even more bent on compartmentalizing the information. Which played right into the hands of HYDRA, ironically.

Or maybe not ironically and Skye is now even more resolved than before.

 

+

 

She surrounds herself with history.

With hindsight it reads more like a horror tale than a textbook.

This is how you get post-war wrong: to circumvent the Posdam and Yalta agreements while still keeping ex-Nazi scientists on the payroll the United States government expurgated those scientists' records – systematically erasing any connection to the Reich, striking their Party memberships from every official file and document. Rewriting the past. These men were not just pardoned, their lives were _cleansed_ , their pasts were washed off of any sin.

(Skye can understand, better than most, how dangerous it is, when you offer a person a blank slate)

The ones who ended up in SHIELD, Zola's colleagues, were not the names history remembers, they were no Van Braun or Strughold or Debus. Not those big names. Other names like _Trenker_ or _Steinhoff_ or _Soderbaum_ , those were the ones that slipped by unnoticed, the ones who joined Zola in those first beginnings.

Their official status was “special employees”.

And while Von Braun and Debus were busy playing with rockets in White Sands, back in Washington ex-HYDRA scientists were developing the next generation of weapons. By the time Howard Stark went fully private the play was already set in motion, SHIELD's R&D division run by the second head nobody knew HYDRA was growing. The second head was the snake in the orchard this time, bidding its time, doing its work.

Howard Stark had time to realize their mistake.

He had four decades of it.

 

+

 

_His father had been an army sniper before joining SHIELD._

_An aim and a calm that people who knew him personally found incongruous._

_He had been precise in his job just as he couldn't in his private life._

_He left newspapers open on every surface, the shoes abandoned in the most inconvenient places, he didn't know how to match colors in his clothes and often ended up with the most ridiculous combinations – the things he bought for his off-work time, the bright, impossible shirts. It wasn't that he was incapable of functioning, no: he could cook and clean and put a load in the washing machine and balance a chequebook and he was a safe driver, and he had the patience when helping his son with his homework. He wasn't a mess, not like that. He was just untidy, unpredictable, a bit whimsical – this is what Coulson remembers the most._

_This is what Coulson remembers the most about his father._

_Having to wear a suit to his job mortified him, and his tie was always slacked, even when he left for work in the morning._

 

+

 

The big giveaway, for her, is the lack of forensic inquest.

There had been witnesses, three other men – respected, dedicated agents without a smear in their records – who had seen Coulson's father shoot Agent Guerin in cold blood and plain sight. Between that and the confession and well – 

It's not like in SHIELD there was ever such a thing as due process. Even recently, Skye has always known people were being sent to the Fridge without a trial.

 

+

 

_That Phil Coulson, he is so loyal, they say._

_It could almost be the beginning of a joke._

_It's not – it's the punchline._

 

+

 

It's a given that not all of HYDRA's secrets were revealed when Director Fury uploaded all of SHIELD's files to the world at large.

And the secrets that remained, well, those were being kept tooth and nail.

If she finds former Director Fury it's only half-coincidence. They are both on the trail of the same target, raiding the same abandoned block of offices.

"You don't look very surprised," he points out. She doesn't, except that she had heard he was in Europe.

"Coulson said he found it hard to believe it, he said you had probably faked your own death."

To be fair, no one in the community really believes Fury is dead (they have seen stranger things come to pass: they have seen small, inconsequential Phil Coulson being brought back to life) so they don't waste their time mourning his complicated memory.

Skye doesn't pretend she wasn't looking for him, to some extent.

Still, this is the first time she meets the man and his status as a ghost doesn't make it any easier.

Even in reduced conditions – casual clothes, beard, any weapon he might carry thoroughly concealed, no badge, of course – Fury cannot look anything other than larger than life. Skye has heard the stories, has believed the stories. But she's here for something more important.

“I'm sorry your stint as an official agent was so brief,” he tells her and it's a good move, it lets her know he's still paying attention; they are still under Fury's watchful one eye, have always been.

“Yeah, it sounds like a joke. I was an agent for a couple of days and then SHIELD totalled. Sounds careless on your part, Director.”

Fury huffs. “Hear you've been chasing rats, too.”

What she's learned, she tells him, is that HYDRA, in the beginning (in the second beginning, HYDRA after HYDRA) was more like a gentleman's club than anything: exclusive, expensive, a lot of prestige for those who could get in. And that other thing: you never really left it, there was no rescission of membership. You could either be successful at your job or you could be dead.

As the organization-inside-the-organization grew it became more difficult to keep the secret. That's when the politics of drastic measures started.

“Somewhere there's a kill list with Agent Coulson's father's name on it,” she says and it's both strange and very satisfactory to be able to say it out loud.

“You think HYDRA murdered him?”

“I think he was set up, at least.”

Skye wonders if he ever stopped to think about it, the fact that the release of SHIELD's complete files into the web meant the world would know about Coulson's real past. 

“What do you want from me?” Fury asks.

She refuses to be intimidated by his tone. She kind of succeeds. She thinks, I want something Coulson hasn't got from you in a long time. She says: “Transparency.”

“I think you mean _cooperation_.”

“I'll get you all my files on this investigation right now. I have no secrets from you,” she says, sharp-tongued, defiant.

He studies her for a while. His head tilts in a way that tells Skye he's not that impressed with what he sees.

"These were not the circumstances under which I imagined I'd meet Agent Coulson's protégé."

Skye smiles at the expression, somewhat nostalgic.

"I'm not his protégé," she corrects the former director of SHIELD. "We're partners."

"I can see that. Does he know you are here?"

Skye doesn't answer, looks away. She has her reasons.

He gestures, his body, his aliveness, it seems. “Keep my secret, okay?”

“As much as I can,” she says. Meaning _not from Coulson_.

Director Fury seems to understand that, too. Nobody said the man got where he got by being stupid. “If you get to talk to Agent Coulson about this tell him... Tell him I owe him a conversation. Do you still have that nice bar in your plane?”

Skye grins. That sounds like a yes on the cooperation front.

 

+

 

Armin Zola's first love had been mathematics.

His first belief (before Hitler, before HYDRA, before Schmidt) had been that mathematics could explain the world in the only satisfactory way he could think of.

He always knew you could write the formula for all the future, if only you could make the present stand still long enough (if you could stop each atom) to map it out. He had to wait a long time until that was possible, until computers and the predictability of human fear evolved to the point where formulating the equation was as simple as – well, as simple as designing the weapons to obliterate the unwanted variables. A deterministic universe does the rest.

Skye knows this too, that if you look hard enough sense emerges. She discovered it through practice, a lonely girl hiding in her van with a computer she won in a bet. Code made sense to her. It meant she was part of a whole. Everything has a recognizable pattern, even the things that appear to be completely random at first. If everything has a pattern you can calculate what comes next – 

But Skye accounts for something that Zola never did: _chaos_. She knows it's not all fear and the certainty of death. There are other things, too. People are predictable, yes, but in new ways every time. Zola was frightened by chaos, so he set out to create chaos in a deliberate way, manufactured chaos to ensure that the order he wanted would eventually come around.

Chaos never bothered Skye.

 

+

 

_When his mother dies he feels sickened that there's a part of him which finds it a relief._

_No more witnesses._

_No more witnesses but him._

 

+

 

This is how you do it: people assume they know the story, they know where the monsters hide – South America, right? Argentine, Peru. This is partly true and they would like you to think that's the whole story.

That's not it. By 1975, Skye gathers, they were already in DC, in LA, in Denver and Omaha and Chicago. And New Jersey.

Because if their first mistake was to invite HYDRA scientists into the organization, the second, greater mistake was to pretend they never did.

By 1975 Howard Stark was out of there, dedicated body and soul to his own company, Peggy Carter busy working with lower ranks, surpervising the training of young recruits, and working the rooms for government loans and private donations like she had promised herself she'd never do.

By 1977 Coulson's father had been dead for a while and the library at Brooks Air Force Base was being renamed the Hubertus Strughold Aeromedical Library.

Not only do the victors get to write history, they are the only ones who can afford to forget it.

 

+

 

She's often gone on missions of her own, while his specialty is to coordinate the remaining SHIELD agents who have nowhere to go but are willing to help. More orphans sheltering from the storm and this is becoming a pattern with them. The Bus overrun by remainders – Fitz and Simmons sometimes complain about the crowd, and Coulson frowns but mostly he just sends Ward and May to procure more food. Because not everyone wants to get a job in Stark Industries like Maria Hill.

Skye's gone often and that makes it easier to avoid him, to continue her investigation without worrying about who might be looking over her shoulder.

She misses him, of course, more than she can say, but she has to be sure. It's easier hiding things from him when she doesn't have to look at him in the eye. This is not a path they can walk together, not yet. She has to protect him. He's bound to notice, soon, because he always does. By them Skye hopes to have found some concrete, solid evidence.

 

+

 

_His father had been a team player, more confident in numbers than in each individual skill. You're bound to miss your shot some time, he always said, only too happy to impart his wisdom to younger agents, better to have a brother having your back. He had amassed a network of friends and colleagues, and they were often the same – he had never been shy of mixing work and real life, and Coulson had grown up watching SHIELD agents stay for a drink, stay for dinner. The man had never been good at compartmentalizing, and though he was never careless with his duty there was no SHIELD secret he didn't trust his wife with, knowing what she'd do with them, knowing there'd be just as safe as with him._

_He had been a team player and that was ironic. And maybe then again not – Coulson realized later, through experience. Traitors are comfortable in groups more than on their own._

 

+

 

At some point he was bound to find out and Skye is glad this is sooner rather than later. It might mean he's paying attention.

“What's going on?” he asks, grabbing her arm for a moment and sitting her on her bunk.

This is not the first time I do this, Skye thinks, as she pushes a memory card in his hand. This time she wasn't hiding it inside her bra, but that doesn't mean it's any less important.

“What's this?”

“That's everything I have,” she tells him.

“On what?”

“On your father.”

His face freezes. She can tell he's so shocked it doesn't even occur to him to be angry with her.

“My father. What are you talking about?”

Skye reaches out and closes the door to her room, pushing Coulson further inside.

“Don't freak out, okay, and don't hate me but... I've been doing some digging.” He looks like he wants to say something, but the desire to hear what she's going to say next wins out. So she says it: “I don't think the story SHIELD told you about your father's death was true.”

She says it in ambiguous terms, so that the shock might be less. She doesn't know how but she can tell that not once in his whole life has Coulson considered the possibility that his father might be innocent.

"This is what you've been doing for months..."

“I've been doing other things, too, but... yes.”

"You've been lying to me," he says, his voice is smaller than it's ever been.

It would be great if her could endure and not break. "I _had to_. I couldn't risk this being a wild goose chase. It would have broken your heart."

And he moves back a bit, letting it sink in. It looks like maybe he is not going to hate her

"I couldn't tell you anything until I knew for sure,” she says again. “I didn't want you to have false hopes..."

The next hour they go over the files together, sitting on Skye's bed with the computer between them. Skye watches as his face becomes more tense, his shoulders too, he's doubling over himself like his chest hurt every time he breathes.

When they finish – when she has finished showing him every little piece of completely circumstantial evidence Coulson looks more confused than before.

“I'm sorry,” he says, searching Skye's face for a meaning he can't decipher on his own. “I don't understand...”

She touches his face, reaching out to brush an unusual lock of hair fallen on his forehead, she notices he's sweating.

“Coulson. Your father wasn't a traitor – he was trying to expose HYDRA. And they killed him for that.”

 

+

 

_His mother had been older than his father when they got married. That didn't mean she was any more together than he was. She had a loud, low laughter than could frighten all the cats in the neighborhood. That had stopped, after his death. She still laughed and played with her son and organized overcomplicated birthday parties for him, but it was not the same laughter, not by a mile. Coulson remembers that. He can never decide if that was love or resentment._

 

+

 

“Coulson. Your father wasn't a _traitor_ – he was trying to expose HYDRA. And they killed him for that.”

This is a defining moment, Coulson thinks. Hearing this. Hearing this in her voice. Here, sitting in Skye's bunk, the HYDRA file up on the screen, Skye's eyes on his face.

This is a defining moment and suddenly it's just as horrifying as the previous one, in a completely different way.

“Why didn't I think of this?” He realizes. Almost forty years, he thinks, appalled. “Why, as soon as I heard HYDRA had infiltrated SHIELD, as soon we all learned about Stark's father...? Why didn't I question...? These are the same people who accused Captain Rogers of being a traitor, I should have at least suspected something.”

“Maybe you didn't want to,” she says, sounding sadder than he feels, sadder than anyone should ever make her. “Because if it wasn't true...”

He closes his eyes for a moment, rubbing his face.

“This is...” he starts. But he doesn't know. “I don't know.”

She rests one open hand on his leg – it's friendly, nothing else, like she was squeezing his shoulder in support. Except it's the Skye version of that, different and surprising and earnest. She gives him a little sad smile before turning serious again:

"I will find the people who did this to your father. Whether they are alive or dead, they will face justice. It doesn't matter what I have to do. Your father's name belongs in a Wall of Honor, not a traitor's list."

She sounds so sure. Not only sure. Convinced. Not just of his father's innocence, but convinced it's her duty to do this, even more than a duty, some kind of fate. Coulson doesn't understand.

He grabs both her hands by the wrists, holding them above his knees.

He presses his face into the shape of her open hands. A little noise, like a sob, escapes his throat. She frees her hands from his grip and suddenly he fears he's gone too far. But then one hand is stroking his head and the other is holding his own hand properly this time.

She threads her fingers through his hair.

He doesn't remember how long they spend like this. Eventually he wakes up, not knowing when he fell asleep, in darkness, in the narrow bed of Skye's bunk, her blankets over him. He opens his eyes, fixing on the light that is coming through the window, and the incongruous shape of Skye's hula girl figurine. It takes him a bit to move from under the sheets, unable to place the memory of how he took off his jacket and his shoes – a vague image of Skye's hands, gentle against his shoulders. Everything smells like her in here, and she is nowhere to be seen.

When he opens the door of her bunk he sees her immediately, perched in one of the plane's chairs, as close as she can to where he was, like a custodian.

“How do you feel?” she asks, looking up from her computer.

“That doesn't matter,” he tells her, because only one thing does. “Who do we go after first?”

 

+

 

_He often wondered how the people he worked with would take it, if he told them._

_Not that he ever seriously considered telling them._

_He never had any real friends in the organization. He had colleagues, people he endured, people he found interesting working with. He made a point not to work with the same team for too long. There were obvious reasons for this. He didn't make much of an effort on building close bonds with the people he worked with. For a while there had been Melinda but even he hesitated to call it friendship, too aware of her status as a subordinate to be guided and used, and then it had all gone to hell and then he had simply abandoned her._

_No one had ever got close enough that there was the risk he might be tempted to tell them._

_He had tried to start that conversation, a couple of times, with women he had been dating, who had nothing to do with SHIELD, just to see how it would sound, but he hadjust felt like a fake._

 

+

 

“There was a confession. He confessed. You must have listened to the tape. Why would he do that if he was innocent?”

“I think I can answer that for you.” She takes out an envelope. “This was one of the things that weren't destroyed in the fire of the Klein Building in California. One of my first physical clues to know there was something fishy.”

She shows him the photographs.

He goes through them with a neutral expression, only pausing more time than necessary on the one where his mother is loading the groceries in the trunk of their car and the boy is waiting by her side.

The first time she saw the picture Skye had recognized an eleven-year-old Coulson immediately. She knew those eyes.

Coulson understood perfectly what these pictures meant. These were very deliberate threats.

“At some point somebody must have showed these pictures to your father, to make him confess,” she says. “He was trying to protect you.”

 

+

 

_He was killed at the height of summer._

_They never let his wife see the body – it didn't surprise her, she knew how SHIELD did things, her husband had always warned her of the dangers of the job. She had always been perfectly prepared for something like this, but never for something _like this_ – and it took hours of interrogations and of requisitioning all of her husband's possessions for SHIELD to come to the conclusion that she had been a victim too, ignorant of her husband's other life as spy and murderer._

_After the funeral (nobody but the widow's family in the wake, no colleagues or associates, the vague feeling that they shouldn't even be throwing a wake, that traitors deserved no public mourning) a young Phil Coulson could be found by the entrance, shooting balls at the hoop above the garage, missing, mostly, still dressed in his black funeral clothes, sweating from the summer heat but refusing to change._

 

+

 

One of the men who bore witness to Guerin's murder, one of the former partners in Coulson's father's assault team, was one of the agents who were transporting him when he was killed and Skye thinks that's just sloppy if it weren't for the fact that the records mysteriously disappeared the same day, the file never reached the Director's hands.

At some point Fury sends her word of some of his findings in Europe. Old HYDRA strongholds which were retrieved by the new version of the group by the end of the 1960s, HYDRA working with East Berlin scientists and strategists, discontents willing to betray the Soviet regime and that was a good plan, chaos spread on either sides of the conflict, either sides of the wall. HYDRA's accent is no longer German, it's Russian too, and American, HYDRA's accent could be anything, could be middle-class Boston too, could be the neighbour, someone Coulson's family had invited for a drink a dozen times.

During the 1990s some of the old SHIELD material was shifted across the ocean, HYDRA getting nervous about centralization and trying to scatter their sins across the globe.

And this is where Fury comes through for them and maybe it's about time, maybe he was thinking that.

Finally a batch of 1970s and 1980s microchips forgotten in a basement in Odessa makes the connection: one of the guards during Coulson's father's car ride had popped up, without anyone noticing it, in the files recovered by Natasha Romanoff from the Lemurian Star, finally a connection to a known and named HYDRA agent.

 

+

 

_”Is your work dangerous?” one of his girlfriends had asked. One of the few who knew Coulson worked for a government agency, a girl smart enough to guess that his hours and the trips he was always on couldn't mean a desk job._

_“No, it's not dangerous,” he lied to her, suddenly reminded of his father always telling his mother how dangerous the job was, telling her like it was a gift, the thing that would keep them on their toes, so they'd never forget how to give themselves fully to the other._

 

+

 

There are some secrets left, some worth killing for, apparently. HYDRA is dead, long live the new version of it. HYDRA is dead, but their children aren't.

But if their secrets are worth killing for they are also taking a bullet for, Skye decides, though in the end she's glad she doesn't have to – it just graces her arm.

There's not even much blood but Coulson is uncharacteristically clumsy when applying first aid and it takes them more than it should.

“This was just supposed to be research,” he says, not looking at her face.

Skye shrugs. “Yes, well.”

He eventually finishes cleaning the wound and his fingertips come away stained in her blood. Skye knows he's thinking _this is not the first time_. When he looks up again he seems irate more than anything else.

“Jesus, Skye, just don't–“

“Hey. This is also my mission,” she says. It's always been more her mission than his. “I have my own reasons for wanting to find out the truth.”

“If you ever get hurt because you were trying to clear my father's name I swear to god, Skye, I swear –“

He doesn't get to specify what he swears. Skye looks down at his fingers tightly curled around her forearm. He looks at it, swears (this time he just _swears_ ), and looks back up at Skye, but he doesn't let go.

 

+

 

_One time Fury let it slip, casually._

_Coulson wouldn't remember the details afterwards – they were just talking about his latest mission, completed with his usual fastidiousness. It had come up, the fact that Coulson didn't like deep undercover, had always found uncomfortable posing as the enemy. Director Fury had made an offhand comment about it, “Not surprising, considering what happened with your father” and Coulson didn't know if it had been indeed offhand or perfectly calculated, a reminder._

_Coulson knew that Director Fury's trust in him sprung from the fact that he knew –exactly– the reasons why he was physically unable to disobey his orders. Coulson preferred it this way; he knew Fury's trust in him would never waver, this way, mutually assured of their confidence in the other. Fury would use him like a weapon he knew could never misfire._

_Later he figured the personal information about his father must have been disclosed to Agent Hill, some time after she was promoted to Fury's right hand. Coulson could tell, something about the way she looked at him, for a while. She never said anything, never let it slip, never used it against him, but Coulson knew her well in those days, something about her eyes._

 

+

 

He's just an old man.

An old man who doesn't remember the child this man holding a gun to his face once was.

“Our orders are to turn him over,” Skye says. She doesn't bother pointing out that they were the ones who came up with those orders in the first place.

“Skye, don't interfere.”

For a moment he looks like he might really shoot. Even though, no, he would never.

Skye knows it's just guilt imploding; for years and years he did nothing about the death of his father, no grief, no revenge, and now he feels he has to pay it all back, make up for the decades of seeming indifference. For years and years Coulson had thought about his father as the enemy and now it's shame about it what makes him hold a gun to this old man's head.

But Skye is not about to let him become a murderer for something as self-serving as that. And well, interfering is all she has been doing so far. She wraps her fingers around the arm holding the gun and squeezes gently.

“ _Coulson_.”

It normally works with her, when he calls out her name in that very precise way. So she hopes it works the other way around as well.

She feels the moment he yields in the way the muscles under her fingertips relax, before he drops his arm.

“Okay,” he says. “I've stopped. It's okay.”

The interrogation is a waste of time. _I knew it would be_ , Coulson says, defeated but not blaming her. This is how HYDRA soldiers are trained. Soldiers, just like the rest of them. The man knows he's old enough that he won't have to spend a day in jail. Since he's already found out there's nothing stopping him from muttering _Hail Hydra_ under his breath as Coulson and Skye walk out of the interrogation room, and he does.

Coulson rubs his eyes. He looks tired and dissatisfied. Skye know the last one is at least a bit her fault.

“We've already made the connection, proved it. That's enough.”

“No,” Coulson says, coldly. “It's not enough. We need more.”

 

+

 

_Dying is easy._

_Dying is more than easy, it's a relief._

_Whatever happens, after this moment, he'll never have to worry about meeting the same end as his father. He might not die like a hero, because a hero is someone who makes a difference – he knows that shot couldn't have done anything more than slow down Loki for a second – but at least he doesn't have to worry about dying as anything less than._

_When Fury tells him to stay awake that's the first order of his Coulson is unwilling to follow._

 

+

 

She doesn't think he is drunk, just that he'd like to be.

They are in a hotel room in D.C. Coulson has kicked off his shoes, dropped his jacket and tie on a chair. The tv is on mute and Skye is not sure why he wants her here.

She refuses the little bottle of scotch he offers her straight from the minibar. But she sits with him over the bed covers.

“I spent so long being angry at my father,” he tells her. “Being ashamed. Thinking all I had to do in life was not become him. I don't know how to do anything else, how to feel anything else.”

“You have to give yourself time. You're still in shock.”

He doesn't speak for a long, long time. 

“ _Skye_. What you've done for me... I don't know how I can...”

“You did the same for me, remember? You found out where I came from.”

“It's not the same,” he shakes his head.

It's not like she is trying to be ungracious, but Skye has never wanted his gratitude. She stops this line of thinking.

“I think we should rest,” she tells him. “Big day tomorrow.”

She stands up to leave but his hand on her wrist stops her. He's looking up at her.

“Just. _No_?”

Skye knows what he is asking. “Sure.”

He lies on the bed, his back to Skye, pulling the bedsheets with him. She takes care of killing the lights and picking up the empty bottles and then gets in bed with him. She doesn't press herself against him, just slides close enough to let him know she's here, with him.

She throws her arm around his waist. 

There's nothing sexual here – there can't be, she knows. It's about comfort and Skye is glad to be able to offer at least that.

It takes for him to fall asleep (eventually his breathing evens out in soft snores, and his body relaxes, spreading, touching Skye at the edges) before she even considers getting some rest.

Then it's a blink, no time at all or so it seems to her, before it's the middle of the night and she hears Coulson struggling in his sleep. She props herself on her knees, bending to look at his face. In this darkness she can't see it well but the noise he makes, the half-words are enough.

She shakes his arm gently.

“Coulson. Coulson.”

He wakes up immediately, eyes focused and alert and on her, questioning.

“I think you were having a nightmare,” she explains.

“I'm sorry. I didn't–“

In the darkness she can't see his face. But she can feel his pulse racing, can hear his labored breathing, she can read panic in every tiny movement under the covers.

She kisses him, close-mouthed but warm. It seems to calm him so she does it again, experimentally.

It's not a decision she makes consciously, _this_ , it's just the way he seems to be seeking some warmth here, the way he follows her mouth like it was the only thing that can give him some peace at the moment. Soon she has pulled her t-shirt over her head and has grabbed his hands and brought them to her breasts. Coulson sucks in a long breath before letting himself be drawn in, after a moment his fingers move across her skin, slowly. Skye pulls the rest of her clothes off easily and presses the whole length of her body against him. It might be a good thing she can't see his face; it might be a better thing he can't see hers. She kisses him again, deep, and patiently, while she undoes his pants and wraps her fingers around his cock.

“Skye?” He doesn't sound unsure of what they are doing, just very surprised.

“Shh. It's okay.”

She climbs on top of him, not stopping her hand until he's ready. And then – it's like the moment he pushes inside her he lets himself _breathe_ for the first time in weeks. She kisses him, tangling her hands in his hair, wishing for a moment she had undressed him first and she could touch, touch, touch. He still tastes of alcohol. He kisses her back a bit, letting out little noises of contentment every time Skye pushes her tongue into his mouth.

He slips one hand around her back, feeling for the shape of her spine.

Skye is under no illusion this means he wants her, not really. She's known for some time he can't. Specially now – he can't be thinking about that. This is not about that. This is about comfort.

 

+

 

_They never celebrated the anniversary of his death, for obvious reasons._

_By the next summer they are already gone, another city, another neighborhood._

_They didn't bother to remove the basketball hoop above the garage and take it with them when they left._

 

+

 

They don't talk about it afterwards, of course.

The day goes by getting ready to storm the last building they think HYDRA was keeping their old records in, a SHIELD-owned building, but that was just predictable. Coming full circle.

And they don't talk about it. Skye knew they wouldn't, knew that already, she wasn't expecting anything from this. Still, it unnerves her a bit, that he could be so calm and nonchalant about it.

They are outside the building, with the assault team ( _volunteers_ , always, from now on, the only way to do something like this), and Coulson is teaching her how to properly adjust her bulletproof vest. He is not acting any different with her, she wonders if he thinks last night was some sort of drunken fantasy.

“Why all the manpower?” she asks. “It's supposed to be empty. The archiving rats having abandoned the boat, or archive, so to speak.”

Coulson gives her a hard stare.

“Last time you said _just research_ this happened,” he says, running two fingers along the spot on her left arm where the skin is not longer tender but the scar remains.

“Got it, fine.”

He barks some orders into the comms.

“End of the road, uh?” Skye says. “Or, you know, hopefully.”

“It doesn't matter,” he says and he sounds different today. “If it's not here we'll keep on searching, that's what we do.”

“That's what we do.”

He turns around for a moment then fixes her a weird glance.

“I want to ask you a question,” he tells her.

Skye's head goes blank and dizzy at the same time, for a moment. This looks like he wants to talk about it, about last night, about maybe _more_. She's not crazy, she's reading the clues.

“ _Oh._ Right.”

“I was going to wait until the mission was over but – it doesn't matter what happens today, or how the mission turns out. If my father gets cleared of the charges. I want to ask now.”

“Hit me.”

“Do you want to have dinner, after this?” he asks, so fucking casual and unimportant and _small_.

She feels like those times when you think there's a step more to the staircase but then there isn't.

“Wow, that is underwhelming. I thought you were gearing to ask something important. Unless asking this is important. Is this important? Are you asking like it's a date or –? In which case, _classy_ , very classy.”

Coulson gives her a blank stare.

He must be feeling better already because he's gone back to being himself about this, which means he is the worst tease. Skye smiles broadly.

“What?” he asks. Like he doesn't know what he's done.

“Nothing. Dinner is the greatest idea you've ever had in your life, A.C.”

“I've missed _that_ ,” he admits, sounds almost shy. For him, anyway.

“Me too.” Skye looks up, one glance seizing the whole building. Sometimes she wonders why it took them so long to figure out Nazis were in control of SHIELD, the architecture was a pretty strong hint. And she figures she is feeling better, too, because she's started cracking bad jokes about it, even if only in her mind. She turns to Coulson: “Ready?”

He doesn't look completely ready for it, but Skye guesses that's kind of the point.

 

+

 

_All those years he worked in D.C._

_All those years he spent holding back, running in the opposite direction of where he should be._

_Agent Coulson [file redacted] didn't know but somewhere in the city there was a HYDRA kill list with his father's name all along._

_It was going to take him a long time to find it though. But it couldn't have happened before. It has to be now._

 

+

 

The downside is that now he has to learn how to mourn.

There's no big public ceremony, no press. This is not Tony Stark baring his soul on television. There were Skye's words to the council which awarded the posthumous honors: perhaps it's not a big thing, cleaning the name of a low level agent killed many decades ago. But because it's not a big thing, it's important. 

Skye had a whole speech prepared, yes, and she didn't let Coulson read it until the meeting.

He knows he is here today – in so many ways – because of her.

He is here today, in this awful fall day with wind throwing rotten leaves into his face.

The gravestone might not look much, people would say, if he was trying to make a point. But Coulson rather likes the simplicity of it. It was never about the medals, or the grandeur in the words. It was about his father and this is him, the simple explanation of what he did: he died for SHIELD, for the truth, and for his family. Coulson kind of let Skye pick the exact words – she refused profusely at first, to be involved with the specificities of it, _this is a family thing_ she said, until Coulson explained that now she was, in a way, his only family. 

It makes sense to him, that she should see this to the very end.

He doesn't feel like he is ready to talk to a grave, though.

“So, _okay_ ,” he says to the wind, and that's enough for now. That's more than he's done in almost forty years.

After a while he's beginning to really freeze his ass off and it's good timing, when he hears her footsteps approach from behind and then he feels Skye's hand on the small of his back and then, some moments later, bolder (because it still takes her a bit to be bold with him) Skye's arms around his waist, her face pressed to his shoulder.

“Awful weather,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says, hugging him tighter.

“Nice gravestone, though,” and he can feel the almost appalled smile against his arm. “Thank you.”

“It's okay,” she tells him. She entwines their fingers together over his chest. “Your hands are cold.”

He squeezes the hands holding his and well, he remembers, his father was the sentimental one, and that's okay, Coulson has learned this: he is his father's son.

“No, they're not,” he says.

Skye chuckles. So much for sentimentalism. She lets go of her grip on him but she takes one of his hands again as she pulls him away from the spot.

“Okay, soldier, I think it's time for you to come home with me,” she tells him, teasing, but placing a conciliatory kiss on the back of his hand.

 _Yes_ , he says to himself. _I think it is._


End file.
